IN LOS ANGELES, EVERYONE IS A STAR
– Denzel Washington
Los Angeles is a wonderland: a teeming atelier of cultures, accents and histories from every latitude. I’ve always wondered how a city this sprawling and feral can cradle so many imaginations at once and yet still have so many of us lining up for the same matcha lattes, Pilates studios and sunlit cafes. We arrive with different passports and past lives and somehow slip into eerily similar routines, each of us convinced we are the main character in a rose-tinted rom-com or a California girl meandering out of a Katy Perry music video.
Behavioral economists call it “choice architecture,” the way a space is arranged to discreetly steer what we do without taking any options away. It sounds clinical, but in LA, it feels almost romantic. The city lays out suggestions like breadcrumbs, making some paths glow a little brighter than others. While that might sound overly calculated, I’ve always felt that this architecture isn’t meant to trap us; instead, it’s meant to burgeon dreamers, performers, wanderers and the hopefuls who come here believing that Hollywood might offer herself to them. In a city where billboards look like celestial bodies and every sidewalk glows like a runway, the whole urban script is written to make you feel a little bit like a star in transit, especially when the sun casts the golden light that holds the city like a mirror. The whole city feels alive around us, engineered by the very paradigm impressed upon us, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
Did we choose matcha, or did matcha choose us? America loves to market wellness like a personality trait and LA happens to be its sometimes delusional, always deluxe showroom. Behavioral psychology calls this “normative nudging,” when something becomes so visible and so praised that it stops feeling like a trend and starts feeling like the default. Research shows that our preferences often shift simply because of what is most visible, most repeated or most socially rewarded. It is not that every UCLA student suddenly woke up craving Erewhon smoothies or tiramisu lattes at Bonsai; it is that the city arranges cues so elegantly that you start wanting whatever it puts in your line of sight. The more we see matcha on menus, on feeds and on sidewalks outside bougie cafes, the more our brains register it as something we must like. Before long, it is not just a drink but a small citizenship test of living here.
Grocery stores greet you with figs and organic herbs the way an art gallery greets you with its brightest painting, gently suggesting that this is who you are now. The cheaper cereal is technically on the shelf, but the city knows you will not bend down for it, so the adaptogenic granola sits exactly where your tired student eyes will land after a midterm. LA is fluent in the psychology of gentle peer pressure. It is why half the students at your table suddenly start drinking iced lavender lattes like it is a legal requirement. LA gives you an entire feed of things to copy and when something looks beloved, our malleable brains file it under “safe to copy,” as if ordering it says something essential about who we are. In more ways than we even realize, the entire city plays along mischievously.
But here is the part I secretly love: LA is not pulling us off course, instead it’s nudging us into little versions of who we want to be. The person who journals. The person who hikes. The person who enjoys a $9 green juice without spiraling. The city gives these identities a stage, sprinkles a little jazz on them and lets us step into them as gently or as dramatically as we want. It is just like Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
So no, maybe none of us invented our matcha era or our Instagrammable aesthetic apartments. Maybe we did not independently discover Pilates or oat milk anything. But in a city that is constantly launching possibilities, originality is not the point. Why are we mocking the script in the first place when we all secretly love it? Maybe LA’s true magic is that it lets you borrow an identity just long enough to grow into it. So “Come on, babe, why don’t we paint the town, and all that jazz?”